Went to my first Bruce Springsteen concert last night. It was closer to a revival service actually. As my friend Sarah put it, “we were baptized by Bruce”. The Boss strutted across the stage, laying down the gospel of love, his heart wide open. He was in love with the crowd and us with him. Three songs in it felt like a freakin’ encore. At one point he walked fifty feet out into the crowd, maybe 15 feet away from where we were dancing, on a raised stage. He then fell backward off the stage in a gesture of radical trust, into the adoring arms of his fans, who knew exactly what he was asking. He crowd surfed his way back to the main stage, doing a little horizontal preaching on the way.
What was most remarkable to me was the feeling of unity in the arena. Strangers standing side by side were dancing together, singing the lyrics, looking into each other’s eyes. Separation dissolved. Identity as personality was ecstatically transcended. This was about a shared common experience that united 17,000 people in a transpersonal ecstasy. Those who had entered the zone were in an egoless space. The joy in the place was overwhelming, and those two statements are radically connected.
True artists, like Bruce Springsteen, are animated by what Catholic priest and paleontologist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called “zest” or a “zest for life”. Zest is a primordial condition, which can be amplified through conscious awareness. For him this far exceeded a merely transient emotional, egoic, state. In his own words, it is:
• “nothing less than the energy of universal evolution, which, in the form of an innate pull toward being, wells up in what is most primitive, and therefore the least directly controllable, in each one of us;
• an energy, the feeling and development of which is to some degree our responsibility;
• and this we must do by a supremely vital operation, the most sensitive part of which is entrusted to the expert knowledge and skill of religion.”
God bless the man, for thinking that religion (Christianity) has the chops to be entrusted with the stewardship, the increase, the harnessing of the blessed evolutionary impulse that was using Springsteen as a vehicle, and through him, awakening and enlivening the crowd. His own religious order shut him down for doing so. It scares the crap out of us. After three hours of being immersed in Springsteen’s vitality, I’ll wager that everybody had the feeling that they wanted to be more just, to self-express more, to love this Earth community more, to care more…because this is what the evolutionary impulse is all about. It’s always filling us with the promise of the more that is possible. And when we consciously step into that promise, we lose ourselves in it (that is we die to our small self, and give birth to our cosmic soul).
This is what animated Jesus and if it’s not what animates the church of the 21st century, we might as we shut ‘er down. Because in the face of overwhelming cultural indifference to what we’re doing, it’s going to take an army of Bruce’s to breathe some life back in the institution. Not carefully parsed theology. Not endless knee groups “processing” our feelings. Not more Christmas bazaars. (No, there’s nothing inherently wrong about any of these). But we’re talking about resurrection here, folks.
Whatever it is we mean by being “in Christ”, it is located in the condition of zest, the sacred, creative, impulse of life itself that had 17,000 people on their feet shouting for more, from a sixty-three year old man from New Jersey who was enacting the resurrected life.
Go Bruce! Our Bruce…not the hmmmm…what’s his nickname? Oh yeah…The Boss!
I hope you break out your guitar more often in church and rock it out…
lotsa love,
sis
p.s. bring your guitar this weekend…seriously…
Love ya
Hi Bruce,
Given your post, which I like very much, you might be pleased to know that the first class of Worship 1, which I took at Emmanuel College in Toronto four years ago, ended with a video clip from Bruce Springsteen in Barcelona. Professor Bill Kervin suggested that a Springsteen concert offered much of what people most want from worship.
I have only heard Bruce live once, as part of post-nuclear freeze march in Central Park in New York City in the 80s. Thomas Moore in his 2002 book “The Soul’s Religion” pointed to anti-war and civil rights rallies in the 1960s as spiritual gatherings.
On the down side, we could channel poet Joyce Kilmer and write “I think that I shall never see / a church service as lovely (or as spirited) as a Bruce concert.”
Ian
Thanks Ian,
What are we going to do about it, I wonder? I mean as an institution? My sense is that it’s happening. Good people all, groping our way to a new reality. It took single-cell bacteria a couple hundred million years to figure out the next step.
Should “the church” try and be like a Springsteen concert or just acknowledge that such a concert is a sacred event and experience?
There are gifted people and special places which have nothing to do with Christianity which are holy.
Maybe Peter Mayer’s “Church of the Earth” is more what people are seeking nowadays – and it’s open every moment – not just on Sundays!
Teilhard’s evolving religion is emerging but not within the old forms.
Provocatively yours,
Don
Great question, Don. There’s a school of thought, as you likely know, that regards the best of secularism/modernism/postmodernism as the flowering of the impulse that gave rise to the great traditions. Interesting that an atheist philosopher like Alain de Botton is revisiting some of the institutions that came out of the church, like pedagogy, the teaching of morality, sacred ritual, etc. in recognition of the fact that secular society is not really doing these things well enough.
Just spent time with a woman who grieves the loss of ritual and traditional values and the village and experiences secular culture as quite crazy and out of alignment with reality.
So, yes, we need to find new forms. In fact, it’s weird that we haven’t allowed our form, our container to morph, expand, in response to the creative impulse. It’s coming.
Like you, Bruce, I’ve always had the same experience when attending countless concerts, and, like you, I’ve seemed to have, had, AllthoughbI’ve I’m progressive, not charismatic, some sort of the latter mentioned experience. Particular instances where I’ve had these, include, to name a few, concerts from U2, whom I’m proud to report, I’ve seen on the ” Popmart” and, a couple of years ago, “360″ deg” tours, now defunct Aussie band “Powderfinger”. And I totally agree with you( and I think I remember reading from your marvellous latest book(which I finished reading recently, and, I hasten to add, Love!!), and that is, like you say, that if we are to have true universality, compassion,etc), we need to find new ways of spir Thanks. Loved youur book, by the way!! ituality, as well as through, but far from withstanding, as religion as it’s best, can produce greater compassion etc,
Thanks Phillip,
Delighted that you enjoyed The Advance of Love, and thanks for weighing in.
Hi Bruce,
Maybe Springsteen provides some insight to answer the question around what can be done with institutionalized religion…with the title of his album “Wrecking Ball”… It seems to me “the church” is crumbling and has become in many cases an unsafe, unstable structure, so what else to do but bring it down. Not out of disgust or violent frustration and disappointment, but because it can no longer safely fulfill the purpose it was built for. How we could consciously dismantle and clear away the rubble would require all sorts of hard choices, and on a practical level seems almost impossible… but for many people of faith the institutional cracks can longer be ignored.
Being an optimist though, I strongly believe that the most fertile seeds and practices of communities of faith such as teaching ethical action and sacred ritual cannot be suppressed, and these could be rooted in new ground and new, evolved forms.
I saw Springsteen in concert twice in my life and he truly transmits the passion and zest you speak of, and I have felt inspired by his music and his personal vision that the promised land is real and worth believing in, despite change and difficult times.
Thanks for the great post!
Eileen
Well said, Eileen. Love the pick up on the Wrecking Ball. Secularism itself is doing a pretty fine job of doing the wrecking.